Other news• The use of chemical cosh drugs for dementia patients will be cut as part of a "national action plan" proposed by a coalition of charities and private companies, reports the Daily Telegraph.

Peter Spencer, the Item Club's chief economist, said that even though the interest rate was likely to remain at its emergency level of 0.5% for at least three more years, consumers would "remain under the cosh".

This one has plenty of entertaining anecdotes about the famous characters who pass through Mr. Lindsay-Hogg's life: Humphrey Bogart, Henry Miller, Mick Jagger "with the face of a Botticelli cosh boy" and the Beatles, squabbling shortly before their final break-up.

Not to mention the hyperbolic cosine function. For which, oddly enough, the relationship holds that:

cosh (x) = cos (ix)

The value of the hyperbolic cosine is defined to be:

e^argument + e^-argument------------------------------- 2

The trajectory described by the function is that of a catenary. Other names that have been given to the curve are chainette (French) and funicular curve.The curve traces the shape taken by a (perfect, uniform) flexible and inextensible chain between two supports, as result of gravity. Galileo was wrong in supposing this curve is the parabola.